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The one I bought is a talent that allows you to charge up a punch with your endurance / stamina / whatever for extra damage.

Indeed. Although I seem to run into a bug every now and then with fistfights where you can't attack. You have to reposition yourself and dodge with the right mouse button.

So I got the game, and I've made it to the big city, which is, I don't know, 4 or 5 hours in? Review of game in progress - Character / character creation: Geralt is no Nameless One, but he works. It's nice that they gave him a voice. Very JC Denton-esque, low on affect. Character creation is distinctive enough, although by the time I start getting silver points I wonder how many bronze-level talents I won't have bought. Combat: System looks to be akin to Jade Empire's, with an emphasis on combos thrown in for good measure. It plays like the bastard child of Diablo and a rhythm game, but it's functional. Magic's fun, but I don't see the three basic fighting styles getting any more complicated or spectacular with upgrades. Setting / Dialogue: Like every DM-created world I played in high school, right down to every (barely sketched-out) female NPC throwing themselves at the PC. Only this time, it's not akward between you and the DM when you successfully copulate with them! Yay! Truly, progress is being made here. There's a lot of stuff about racial tensions and corrupt society / religion, but it's all thoroughly cynical. When everything is dirty and blackened, it's not much easier to engage in the setting than if everything was squeaky-clean and kid friendly ala Oblivion. You distance yourself from the game all the same. There's science shoe-horned into magic and genetics shoe-horned into alchemy, but in the end it's just magic and alchemy. Story: The expanded english translation is nice and helpful, if not for illuminating the original intent of the developers than for restoring all the utterances of "****" and "dog's balls" that were lost in translation. The collection quests and constant lap-running on the map made the first parts of the game pretty damned dull, and I'm trying not to think of having to do it all again in order to experience all the plot-branching. The game is engaging, but only because it contains milestones, and it's easy to occupy one's time checking off such. All in all, I'm unimpressed thus far.

You have messed up priorities and odd taste.

Truth be told, I too wouldn't mind seeing a sequel. It'd have to be a pretty major overhaul in most all elements of the game, though.

That's one of the big problems I had with JE, besides the fact that the game was horribly unbalanced (max out the Toad Demon and spam jumping strong attacks and you're set to beat the game unhindered) was the fact that there just wasn't a lot of variety. It was as bad (no, worse) than Oblivion, especially with the characters. Try as you might, all the different "character types" ended up exactly the same not too far into the game. It's the main reason I didn't care to play through it again upon completion.

It's built off of rock-paper-scissors. You've got weak fast attacks that beat strong attacks, strong attacks that beat blocking, and blocking, which beats the weak fast attacks. In real-time, at first it's somewhat exciting and fresh, but after about an hour or two, you realize how incredibly simple it all is. You just spam weak attacks until they block, at which point you throw a strong attack. They add in "support styles", which are the same as normal attacks except instead of doing damage they debilitate the enemy, but the spamming element stays the same.

It seemed to me as though New Reno included a number of things that were designed more as "hey, that's cool/funny" fodder than actual coherent parts of the setting, but they more or less gel with the rest of the game. It's when you think about it that it doesn't make a lot of sense, particularly the porn stuff. As for the mobsters, yeah, they're all over-the-top caricatures. But in all actuality, life imitates art. Stereotypical gangsters from the movies are cool, and real gangsters imitate them. In the 60's/70's it was the Godfather, these days it's the Sopranos. In that sense, the bouncers aren't terribly out of place (really, it was only the bouncers and Mordino who were throwbacks to pop mafia fiction, and Mordino was on overt Godfather reference).

Reno was fine enough, it was like a microcosm of the Fallout universe - the only really advanced faction (Salvatore) was the smallest and most insular. They got their stuff from an outside source. What made San Francisco so preposterous was that, even if there was GECK use in the city's history that I can't recall or don't know about, the Shi were far more advanced than anyone else in the game. All it took was a lab and some elbow grease and they pretty much solved one of the game-specific Big Huge Problems, Jet addiction, and one of the setting-specific Big Giant Huge Problems, radiation contamination, although conveniently they couldn't get their plants to grow outside the city limits. If I didn't know any better I'd accuse Black Isle of populating their game with Magical Asian Men, that peculiar substrain of the famed Magical Black Men, the pixie-like Africans that hollywood screenwriters insert into movies as a device to give self-absorbed white people much needed help and non-judgmental life lessons.

I disagree. The sense that I got was that retaining technical knowledge over time in the Fallout universe was like trying to keep a fire going on the Everest summit. That's what made the Brotherhood (and the GECKs that made them somewhat obsolete) so important. Think about it. Especially in a retro-future, advanced technology would need constant maintenance to work. Only the Vaults and the brotherhood bunkers were self-contained and working 80 years after the bombs dropped, and even then when something as relatively minor as a processor chip stopped working it was a major crisis. In the universe of Fallout 1, everything is decaying. The Brotherhood isn't seen as much of a hope, they're more of a band-aid applied to a bullet wound. Given all this, Arroyo makes some sense. Even when you've got a thousand technical manuals lying around, when you're living in a canyon system in the middle of nowhere you're not going to be anything but backwoods rural after a generation or two. If anything, the inconsistency in the Fallout 2 (one that you'll hear a lot about from the fanbase, not without reason) was in the fact that there seemed to be actual widespread progress and growth. The GECKs changed the Fallout universe immensely. I mean christ, they were basically apocalypse-reversing suitcases. They might as well have been Scrolls of Perfect Wish, silver bullets against the themes of the original game. And there were a lot of them, too. At least 4 of them in something like a 50 mile radius (Vault City and Shady Sands, plus the 2 the player can find). In D&D we call that a "magic-heavy setting". And even without the GECKs, San Francisco is way too advanced (more advanced than any other location!)

Exactly. It wasn't different enough and it suffered for it.

JE is obviously fantasy, and not even of the nitpick-y semantic sort. The only difference between JE and Tolkien or D&D is the base of myth and folklore from which it's designed. Replace elves and dwarves with spirits and demons, replace magic spells with chi martial styles. It's all functionally the same. Anybody who claims otherwise is either daft or intentionally trying to mislead. On that note, JE was easily the least sketched-out world Bioware has ever placed a game in, not just because it was a new IP, indeed, probably because it was a new IP. There were things (particularly geography and history) that seemed intentionally vague. That always annoyed me.

There's not a whole lot they can really do to "capitalize" on anything. If the strike lasts as long as the last one (22 weeks or thereabouts) then the game industry won't have time to take any sort of special action. That length of time covers pre-production on some projects. Things will pretty much stay the same, it's just maybe more people will be playing games. It's not as if the writer's strike will bring about better games.

Having recently replayed the game (which I had never done, as JE was the only Bioware game that wasn't interesting enough to me to warrant an instant replay) the sense I got was that if they were to continue forward they would focus in part on the "East" of the setting, which would obviously be Japan.

Yeah, they totally removed the "pointing" portion.

The idea that the United States could somehow insulate itself from the rest of the world is patently ridiculous. We live in the age of the ****ing internet, for God's sake. Every man, woman and child retreating to South Dakota with their dogs, guns and meth labs wouldn't insulate them.

I'm not particularly enamored of the armed forces myself, but the risk of being in the army is often exaggerated. These days, even in times of conflict, the chances that you'll die in the service are relatively small. A big part of that is due to medical tech, of course. Many more amputees than there used to be. I'd expect them to fix Veteran's Affairs first before making any sort of big push to fill out enrollment lists. Aside from that, military service is as legitimate a route to any for citizenship. Better than most, in some respects. At least it ought to be. Theslug, Dark Raven and Guard Dog, you're on the wrong forum. [Edited by SteveThaiBinh to remove link]

Liara's planet is pretty short and easy, as plot-critical quests go. Plus you can take her to Noveria, where you'll hear some not-very-good emoting. I usually hit some of the optional quests first to get my level up and acquire some marginally better gear.

Most of the systems are available from the get-go, but a few are "unlockable" via quests. For example, after you clear out the geth from the 4 systems in the Armstrong Cluster, a 5th appears.

An RPG that caters to a the laziest appetites of comic geekdom and fails to deliver on its meager promises whenever the opportunity arises to resolve a plotline? Sounds delightful. This thread is a monument to tunnel vision.

Man, people don't like good music.

It doesn't make any sense for Musharraf to have killed Bhutto. He needed Bhutto to gain legitimacy through the power-sharing that was inevitable. Now that won't happen. Sharif certainly won't play ball. As for the woman herself, she was firmly anti-extremist, but she was also, if not corrupt herself, permissive of her husband's. He skimmed millions off of gov't contracts back when she was in power. Still, there exists the possibility that it was an ISI hit. From what I've heard she was shot twice and then the suicide bomber struck, which is unusually if not suspicious.

Sure, if you like Rainbow Six. Instant or even gradual healing would make it fantasy.

There are enough elements in Mass Effect to deem it fantasy of a sort. Most sci-fi is fantasy, with conscious AI or faster-than-light travel or other convenient implausibilities. The Asari mind-meld is beyond any sort of explanation. But most of the force-like (hell, force-identical) powers in ME are explained away through the "element zero" plot device, which is above "it's an invisible, unknowable force" in terms of plausibility, but not by much. But that's all semantics and pretty off-topic. We all know what Kaftan means when he says "fantasy", there's no point in bringing up the fantasy elements of science fiction. That having been said, I disagree with him, and I urge the game, literary, and role-playing communities not to drop everything they're doing and cater to his whims.